UN/MASKED: Memoirs of a Guerrilla Girl on Tour

Winner of the 2017 Devil’s Kitchen Reading Award in Prose Nonfiction

An unknown actress on movie star’s arm was how she began. An anonymous activist in a rubber gorilla mask is where she wound up.
UN/MASKED: Memoirs of a Guerrilla Girl On Tour follows the surprising twenty-five-year journey of a young artist, Donna Kaz, who is swept off her feet by Willliam Hurt, a rising star, and carried to a beach house in Malibu. The actor William Hurt introduces her to Hollywood’s elite by day and knocks her head in by night. When OJ Simpson kills his former wife in Brentwood, a bell goes off and awakens her angry, activist spirit. Always an outsider, she takes one step further into invisibility and becomes a Guerrilla Girl, a feminist activist who never appears in public without wearing a rubber gorilla mask and who uses the name of a dead woman artist instead of her own. As a Guerrilla Girl, Aphra Behn creates comedic art and theatre that blasts the blatant sexism of the theatre world while proving feminists are funny at the same time. These two narratives-that of a young victim of domestic violence at the hands of a successful actor and that of an artist so fed up with sexism in the theatre world that she puts on a gorilla mask and takes the name of a dead woman artist to provoke change-have been lived by one woman. Donna Kaz offers her compelling first-hand account-illuminated by twenty behind-the-scenes photographs-of her transition from a silent observer to an unapologetic activist. This is the memoir of a woman-turned-survivor-turned-radical-feminist who takes off her mask and, by merging her identities, reveals all.